My wife and I have gotten Netflix recently. They have a lot of good movies, and this week I watched Apollo 13. The basic plot of the movie centers around these three men who are on a mission to walk on the moon. When they get into outer space, something goes wrong on their ship, and the mission drastically changes to one of rescue. There are dozens of obstacles that must be overcome, and you find yourself rooting for the truly heroic engineering of the astronauts and the hundreds of people working around the clock to bring them home.
The movie just ended, and I am writing this as the credits are rolling. They do indeed make it back! The epic soundtrack is still ringing in my ears. At the end of the movie, for over three minutes during their re-entry, there is radio silence. The climax is the moment that you hear Tom Hanks voice as Jim Lovell break the radio silence letting Houston and the world know that they have made it. Families rejoice! The spell-bound world takes a deep sigh of relief. Mission control cheers. Joy! Peace! Comfort! The director of mission control sinks back into his chair as emotions overcome him, and he rests in a job well done, NASA's finest hour, the failure that was a success. No moon rocks, but in bringing the men home, they achieved the seemingly impossible.
It is a great story. You find yourself rooting for the characters. Even better that it's a true story. (God wrote it, right?!) What can we learn from this story?
From this true story I take several lessons regarding evangelism...
1. This movie is a story about salvation. These men's lives are at risk. But so are the lives of many around us. While the astronauts are threatened by death in the vacuum of deep space, those around us are threatened with being swept away into eternal damnation. What is worse? Harm to the body, physical death? Or harm to the soul, spiritual death? Do we root for and become as invested in the salvation of souls from hell as we do about astronauts from death?
2. This movie is a story about sacrifice. The NASA community are committed to bringing their men home. They feel duty bound to do so. Those men in space are their brothers, and they will do whatever it takes. They band together to see it happen. Just like a marine will not leave a wounded man behind to be taken by the enemy, so NASA refuses to leave their men in space if there is anything possible they can do about it. Do we feel such an intense loyalty to the people around us in the various and expanding spheres of neighbors we have that we will do anything to see them saved? Look at what our Savior sacrificed in love for us! True friendship and love is to lay down our lives for the sake of others, as our Savior did for us. We carry around the death of Christ in us, and as we suffer for his sake to bring the gospel to others, we fill up what was lacking in Christ's afflictions, namely a flesh-and-blood picture of the sacrificial love of Christ to the community we happen to be in.
3. This movie is a story about the commitment of community. As stated above, the camaraderie of the NASA family was amazing and inspiring. I want our churches to be like that. We should work together and band together because we are in a life-and-death struggle for the very real lives of those around us. Going to church should have an urgency and a weightiness and a brokenness over the lost. We are on a mission. During those days of Apollo 13, the seven days they were in space, the salvation of those men reprioritized literally everything for those who were connected to them in some way. Church should be a time when we willingly submit to a radical reprioritization of our lives so that we are living worthy of the gospel for the sake of the lost and ultimately the sake of God's glory.
4. This movie is a story about expertise. Hearing the men in the mission control and in the space ship prepare for launch was like hearing a symphony. Checking down the systems, they each call out that they are okay to go. In the end it took everyone working on all the systems to get their specific job done. Each person in the NASA team had a specific passion and gifting that they had given their lives to do. They couldn't do everyone else's job, but they could do their own, and that was necessary. A very necessary chain. The Body of Christ functions this way. We are called to be who we are and not anyone else. If you're a pinky toe, be a pinky toe.
Additionally, I believe every single believer, because of the urgency of the gospel, is called to be a threefold student. 1. We are called to be students of the Word and students of the Gospel. And preaching the Gospel to others should simply be the natural overflow of daily preaching it to ourselves as the primary means and motivation of our sanctification. 2. We are to be students of this age. We are to be discerning about the world we live in, and we should know it and its pitfalls very well, so that we may warn and help the perishing. 3. We are to be students of people. We should invest far more time into knowing deeply those around us than we do in knowing fictional characters, pets, and other things. Be an expert in people; they will certainly outlast the things that will not make it to the next world.
Ultimately all of this is in God's hands. After all that NASA did, the fate of the crew was still in the hands of God. We can do nothing to save people. Jesus died and rose to bear the sins of the world. Jesus saves! Jesus gets the glory as the Savior of sinners. To him alone be all the glory. But he gives us the responsibility to go. We are to go as witnesses of a Risen Savior. His Spirit alone can awaken dead hearts, but he has ordained that the preaching of the Gospel be the means by which he awakens those dead hearts, and he has entrusted the preaching of the Gospel to his Spirit indwelt Body. What a privilege! We preach repentance and forgiveness. Paul, who spoke of the sovereignty of God over everything, including salvation, yet believed more than anyone that there was power in the preaching of the gospel, and he groaned and ached, even wishing he could take the place of his Jewish brothers, so that they might see Jesus and believe.
Oh God, let us lose sleep, groan inwardly, weep deeply. Help us become students of the Word and of our fellow man, and hear our prayers for the salvation of the lost. Brothers and sisters, let us come together as the people of God and take seriously our call as a missionary Body in this world. Let us not waste our lives... Soli deo Gloria!
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